- F5 Insight, an AI-driven observability tool, lets IT teams monitor and manage hybrid multicloud applications using natural language.
- AI Remediate speeds up the pipeline from vulnerability identification to runtime protection
- And F5 is bolstering post-quantum cryptography readiness
F5 APPWORLD 2026, LAS VEGAS — AI seems like magic. But as organizations move AI-enabled applications from proof-of-concept to pilot to production, they encounter all the management and security challenges that decades of normal, non-magic applications face.
“It’s one thing to deploy applications. It’s another thing to do it in production at enterprise scale and make sure they’re secure,” Shawn Wormke, F5 senior VP of product management, told Fierce.
To help solve those non-magical problems, F5 kicked off its annual customer conference today with new tools designed to help organizations manage and secure complex AI-driven hybrid and multicloud applications, as well as prepare for post-quantum cryptography.
The company launched F5 Insight, a tool to help deliver AI-driven proactive guidance for real-time monitoring and analytics across application and infrastructure layers. IT teams interact with the service using natural language.
Cutting through the AI noise
“Most operations teams are stuck babysitting complexity they did not sign up for,” said Kunal Anand, F5 chief product officer, in a statement. “They have a dozen tools, a thousand alerts, and not enough signal. … With F5 Insight, we turn scattered telemetry into a clear story and the next best action."
F5 Insight is now available for BIG-IP, the vendor’s load balancing, traffic management and application delivery platform, with plans to bring support to the NGINX delivery software for cloud-native applications. F5 also plans to bring Insight to Distributed Cloud Services, F5’s software-as-a-service platform for managing app delivery and security across multi-cloud and edge environments.
F5 Insight is built in to the company’s Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP), which does exactly what it says on the tin — it’s a platform for delivering and securing applications across multiple clouds, on-premises data centers and the edge.
F5 also beefed up the security capabilities of its platforms. “We’re advancing the way we deliver enterprise application security by using AI in our products to provide better security and make people ready for the post-quantum era,” Wormke said.
The vendor also enhanced ADSP to speed up identifying and remediating vulnerabilities in AI models, building on F5 AI Red Team, a swarm of AI agents that simulates adversarial attacks to find vulnerabilities.
Patching the AI security gap
To patch AI security gaps, F5's AI Remediate accelerates time-to-response between identifying AI model vulnerabilities and enforcing validated runtime protections, the company said. As a further use of AI to enhance security, the vendor also added AI capabilities to its Distributed Cloud WAF (web application firewall), which protects web applications.
In addition, F5 is beefing up post-quantum cryptography readiness with BIG-IP version 21.1, planned for the second quarter of calendar 2026. And the new BIG-IP Zero Trust Access debuts quantum-resistant TLS/SSL VPN tunneling for secure application access and data transmission, F5 said.
Finally, F5 debuted new integrations with Red Hat OpenShift to help enterprises deploy and operate AI security faster on-premises. Specifically, F5 launched Red Hat OpenShift Operators and quickstarts for F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team, to automate deployment, configuration and lifecycle management of the F5 software on on-premises OpenShift.
F5’s competitive landscape
F5 is addressing market needs, said analyst Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of research for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). The F5 news comes as AI becomes more and more integrated into infrastructure and security.
“Most infrastructure and security vendors are following this path, both enabling their customers to implement AI projects while also using AI to enhance their products,” he said.
F5’s biggest competitors are the cloud providers, McGillicuddy said. The vendor faces the challenge of overcoming IT teams’ tendency to use the cloud platforms’ own application delivery controllers and load balancing services. F5 also faces a challenge expanding beyond its traditional application security strength, McGillicuddy said. “As they do that, they move into competition with traditional network security and cybersecurity vendors,” he said
In addition to the cloud providers, F5 competes with SASE vendors and network security vendors, though they are also complementary to those providers, McGillicuddy said.
Organizations use F5 to provide security services traditionally integrated into ADC platforms, such as WAF and bot detection but, “it faces stiffer competition when it tries to take market share from SASE and firewall vendors. Customers trust [F5] for app security, but they sometimes don’t perceive them as a network security vendor,” McGillicuddy noted.